X-Chem announces license of first three drug candidates to AstraZeneca

X-Chem Inc., a Waltham company that screens drug candidates from its own library with the help of informatics, has scored license agreements for three of its drug candidates with drug giant AstraZeneca for undisclosed amounts.

Rick Wagner, CEO and co-founder of X-Chem, said that while the licenses are the first the three-year-old biotech has announced, it’s still working under several other collaborations, including the one with Roche announced when the company was founded. Chief Business Officer Diala Ezzeddine said “we’ve had several successes” under that partnership so far, and that X-Chem is also working with several other “top-tier” drug companies and academic institutions in partnerships that have not been announced.

The privately-held biotech said in a statement that it has achieved several milestones since a collaboration between the two companies was announced in May 2012. The candidates licensed by AstraZeneca are a cancer drug, a respiratory/inflammation drug and an antibacterial. While the company is not releasing financial information regarding the license agreement, it said the payment to X-Chem includes an upfront payment and research funding, as well as milestone payments for discovery and clinical development “commensurate with the innovative nature of the research and significant unmet medical need of the disease indications.”

The 30-employee company works with a group in China, BioDuro, which does much of chemical work. X-Chem has filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission for two investments of $8.5 million each, both from the Wilmington, N.C.-based contract research organization Pharmaceutical Product Development LLC. The first investment came in 2010, and the second was in January of this year, when X-Chem spun off a separate company called X-Rx to focus on internal development, said Wagner.

“Today’s announcement illustrates X-Chem’s ability to serve as a leading source of novel small molecule therapeutics for our research partners. Our discovery platform capitalizes on multiple proprietary innovations in library design, screening methodology, and informatics that underlie its exceptional performance at identifying novel leads and addressing previously ‘undruggable’ targets,” said Wagner in a statement.